Helix (5 page)

The
following morning, at breakfast, he met Bruckner again. The man was just as
impeccably attired, and still insisted on wearing his trademark wraparound
shades.

He
drank orange juice across the table from Hendry and gave an outline of what the
new arrival was to expect over the next few days. He would undergo basic
training—nothing that should prove too taxing, given his prior experience in
space—along with a regime of physical exercise. Before all that, he would meet
his five colleagues in the maintenance team. In a little under a week they
would take a shuttle up to the
Lovelock
, where cryo-technicians would
put them under for the long sleep.

“And
you?” Hendry asked as Bruckner was about to rise and leave.

The
official smiled and resumed his seat. “You mean, am I coming along?” He shook
his head. “I applied but was rejected. Middle-management hacks are not in high
demand for the colony the ESO plans for out there.”

“I’m
sorry.”

Bruckner
nodded. “But if you think I’m doing this out of altruism, well...”

Hendry
wondered what possible reward there might be, other than job satisfaction, in
working on a project like this.

Bruckner
went on, “This is the low-down, Hendry. Switzerland as a functioning state is
dead, kept alive artificially by the ESO. And even our time is finite. We have
contingency plans, however; islands north of Denmark, where we’ve started
self-sufficient colonies. When the
Lovelock
launches and things get too
bad here, we plan to evacuate there and try to keep some semblance of culture
alive.” He shrugged. “For how long, I don’t know. Put it this way, my wife and
I don’t plan to have children. And if that seems cynical... well, you think
what it might be like to remain behind.”

“Touché,”
Hendry said.

After
breakfast he was introduced to Sissy Kaluchek and Lisa Xiang, respectively a
cryogenics specialist and a pilot. They were in the gym, going through the
series of set callisthenics devised by the physio. They broke off to come over,
introduce themselves and chat awhile. The rest of the team, they explained, had
been passed fit and rewarded with a day off.

Kaluchek
was a tiny Inuit, whose wide dark eyes and high cheekbones—and the fact that
she was perhaps fifteen years his junior—reminded him of Chrissie. He liked her
immediately, something confiding in her hesitant smile and softly spoken
demeanour. Xiang was in her late thirties, a muscular Taiwanese whose
forthright manner struck Hendry, after so little human contact for years, as
disconcertingly abrasive. “Welcome to the team,” she said in a strong
Californian accent. “We call ourselves the second-stringers. I mean, lucky, or
what?”

Kaluchek
rolled her eyes. “You call us the second-stringers,” she corrected.

That
evening they sat around a table beside the pool as waiters served them the
finest food Hendry had eaten in years, and he met two further members of the
team.

Greg
Cartwright was a bright-eyed American pilot, impossibly young, who gave the
impression of being overawed by the fact that he’d been being plucked from oblivion
and sent to the stars, granted, as it were, a second chance. He chattered
happily about the mission, going over the smartware programs with an enthusiasm
the others found obviously amusing.

Friday
Olembe, by contrast, was in his late thirties and taciturn—and the little he
did say struck Hendry as cynical.

The
African listened to Cartwright enthusing about what they might discover out
there, then said, “So even if we do find a habitable planet, what’s the chances
of us not messing it up like we did this one?”

Cartwright
opened his mouth to speak, but fell silent as Xiang looked up. “Haven’t you
read the mission brief, Olembe?”

“From
beginning to end, boss.” The way he emphasised the last word suggested to
Hendry that Olembe had an issue with the Taiwanese woman’s role as team leader.

“Then
you obviously didn’t take in the way we’re going to go about building a new
society, did you?”

Olembe
stared at her. “So many words. I heard similar words from the UN about Africa,
years back. And we got fucked over royally, even so.”

Xiang
shook her head. “There’s a big difference now. No one else is in control. We
are. Our destiny’s in our own hands.”

The
African pulled a face. “Give me a break. You’re beginning to sound just like
the mission brief, Xiang.”

Hendry
noticed Kaluchek staring at Olembe with ill-concealed dislike. “And you,” she
said, “are full of shit.”

Olembe
was about to reply, but stopped himself as a tall woman walked to the table
carrying a tray. She had an oval face, dark hair drawn back, and moved with the
poise of a ballerina. She set her tray beside Hendry, nodding to him in
greeting and said, “Carrelli, team medic.”

Xiang
said, “If you’re so down on our chances out there, Olembe, why did you accept
the position?”

Everyone
around the table turned to look at him. Olembe simply shrugged and said, “You
been to Lagos recently?”

The
Italian medic sat back, watching the exchange. She said nothing, but calmly ate
her meal. Hendry wondered how much her insularity was a personal
characteristic, and how much the consequence of being the sole survivor of the
terrorist bomb that had killed her five former team members.

That
night Hendry sat beside the pool, alone. Over the past few years he’d never
given much thought to the heavens, other than gazing once or twice at the full
moon, and the red spark of Mars on the horizon. Now he stared up at the
magnificent spread of the Milky Way and found it impossible to credit that
soon—subjectively, at any rate—he would be out there among those burning points
of light.

Ehrin Telsa left
his
mother’s mansion and skated along the ice canal between the looming, monolithic
buildings that crowded the centre of the city. Agstarn was quiet this early,
just after dawn in the second month of deep winter, and few citizens braved the
razor winds that sliced down from the surrounding mountains. Those who did
venture out wore padding so thick they resembled globular summer fruit. The
only creatures that could go abroad without some form of protection were the
stolid zeer, great shaggy beasts used by the jockeys to haul carts and
taxi-sledges. They plodded slowly along the canals, their breath misting the
air like ectoplasm and their manure, dropped prodigally all along their route,
melting the ice and creating hazardous potholes.

Ehrin
kept an eye out for these pitfalls, but his thoughts were elsewhere. His mother
had died a week earlier, after a long illness, though Ehrin had found it hard
to mourn the passing of the woman whose heart had been as hard and unyielding as
the glacial ice that surrounded the city in deep winter. It was what she had
told him on her deathbed, and his subsequent discovery, that unsettled him now.

One
week ago, hours from death, she had gripped his hand and raised herself with
the fanatical strength of the dying and stared into his eyes. “Your father was
a strong man, Ehrin. He had principles. But sometimes principles can be your
undoing. He defied the Church to his cost...” And here, to Ehrin’s
exasperation, and despite his prompting, she had relapsed into a fitful sleep.
She regained consciousness only once more, to rant incomprehensibly about
vengeful Church militia, before her breath rattled like a ratchet in her throat
and her eyes glazed like turned zeer milk.

During
the days that followed, through his mother’s bleak interment in the permafrost
of the central cemetery and after, he had dwelt on her words.

The
subtext was that Ehrin’s father had defied the Church on principle, and
suffered. But how had he suffered? He had owned the biggest dirigible company
in the city, supplying the Church itself with the machines, and had owned a
great mansion on Kerekes Boulevard overlooking the winter gardens. He had been
a genial, happy man right to the end... He had died test-flying an experimental
dirigible when Ehrin was ten, and the loss had affected Ehrin in two ways: he
had experienced a physical pain as if something had been torn from the cavity
of his chest, and mentally he had resolved to continue his father’s work, to
make the Telsa Dirigible Company even bigger and better.

Late
last night, while going through his mother’s hoarded belongings, he had
happened upon a sheaf of letters from his father, which she had kept tied with
string in a locked chest in the attic.

The
return address of one particular letter had caught his attention and sent his
heart racing. He had never known that his father had travelled beyond the
confining mountains of Agstarn, but here was an envelope bearing the address of
Sorny on the very edge of the western plains—and presumably delivered the two
thousand miles to Agstarn by carrier hawk.

The
letter had been surprisingly brief. Dated fifteen years earlier—just months
before his father’s death—it was barely a page long and described the living
conditions in the town of Sorny, on the edge of the circumferential sea. But
more interesting than the litany of hardships his father was undergoing was
what he read in the final few lines: “I have neither the space nor the time to
describe here the terrible things K and I have seen today. That will have to
wait until I’m with you again. With all my love, Rohan...”

The terrible things...
What can his
father have meant? Ehrin had gone through the other letters his father had sent
from Sorny, had discovered nothing other than the gruelling conditions suffered
by the expeditionary force and the locals. Could it be this that his father
referred to, the starvation, the attention of wild animals from the ice plains?

With
his father dead, and now his mother, it would appear that the secret had died
with them... but for that mention of K.

Could
it be, Ehrin wondered, that the mysterious K was none other than Kahran
Shollay, his father’s business partner and now Ehrin’s partner in the Telsa
Dirigible Company?

As
he took a sharp bend in the ice canal, heading for the foundry on the edge of
town, Ehrin was aware of the letter in his jacket pocket, like a burning coal
next to his heart.

The
foundry occupied the last three blocks of a terrace of ancient mills on one of
the oldest ice canals in Agstarn. His father had once explained that the
foundry had to be positioned on the edge of town so that the dirigibles, once
constructed, could be launched without the hindrance of surrounding buildings:
the entire west-facing wall at the end of the terrace was a vast sliding door,
through which the magnificent dirigibles were inched, with much pomp and
fanfare, on the day of their maiden flights.

It
was a dark, dour industrial area, the surrounding stonework stained with the
coal dust of centuries. Against this, the bright fires of the foundry showed
cheerily through doors and windows along the length of the building. Within the
foundry, the tiny figures of workers could be seen going about their business,
dwarfed by the smelting ovens, the mammoth crucibles and the rearing skeletons
of the partially completed dirigibles.

Ehrin
skated towards the entrance, kicked off his skates and hurried into the fierce
heat of the shop floor.

He
was sweating within seconds, perspiration running into his eyes and creating an
impressionistic blur of half-naked workers toiling in hellish conditions. He
tore off his padded jacket and climbed the wooden steps that gave on to the
office area. Kahran was not at his desk this morning, and Ehrin wondered if he
had fallen ill again. Approaching one hundred, Kahran was stubbornly proud of
his health and fitness, though of late he had succumbed to a succession of
viral infections. Ehrin had been unable to tell the old man to slow down, take
it easy: Telsa Dirigibles was Kahran’s life. While most men of his age had
retired gracefully, Kahran refused to let up and came into work nine days of
the week.

Ehrin
passed through the offices and came to a second flight of stairs, which gave
access to the long attic that for five years, since coming of age and
inheriting the company, Ehrin had made his home. It was crammed with
overstuffed armchairs and sofas, and lined with rickety bookshelves; many of
the old tomes had been his fathers, dry engineering treatises alongside more
readable accounts of adventures in the eastern and western plains.

A
semicircular window looked out over the outskirts of the city and the towering
peaks of the western mountains. Before it Ehrin had placed his favourite
armchair, in which he spent most of his working day going over paperwork,
checking blueprints and poring over the order books.

He
smiled at the irony. As a boy he had dreamed of adventure, fancied himself as
an explorer blazing a trail in one of his father’s skyships, opening up the
land to east and west... Instead, he had become an engineer, and not even a
hands-on engineer at that; the responsibilities of running the family business
had taken him from the shop floor, even from the drawing office, and tethered
him to his father’s desk, which he had lately abandoned for the more
comfortable haven of his armchair. His younger self would have snorted in
contempt.